The Age of Reinvention (27 page)

To begin with, there is his name, François Yahyaoui. He has never been able to stand his first name—he hates it. François is so French, and yes, he has no problem admitting that it pisses him off. He would rather be named Mohammed or Djamal or Kamel like everyone else he knows, and he would rather have the surname Tahar like his brother. He would rather be dark-skinned and dark-eyed and dark-haired like his mother, a Muslim like all his friends. In this mainly North African housing estate, he struggles to fit in. They call him the Blond, they call him Honky. What can he do about it? Sometimes they even mockingly nickname him King François—that's the worst one, as it brings to mind the father who rejected him. His mother, who has a love of storytelling, invented a story that she makes him repeat: My father was in the army, you tell them. My father was a pilot and he was killed in action, you tell them. He adds: He was a hero. Yes, and you tell them: My father was French. And that's all you say. That was a very difficult time for his mother: Samir had just left home, and Brunet had cut her off completely. A few months before this, after several aborted attempts at reconciliation, François had tried one last time to reestablish a relationship with his father. He had waited for him outside the National Assembly. Seeing him arrive from a distance, accompanied by a young executive in suit and tie who was carrying a stack of thick folders under his arm, François felt a sort of pride in his father's career. But when he approached him, the old man blanked him and kept walking. François watched him walk to the nearest restaurant—one of those noisy Parisian brasseries where the cheapest item on the menu cost €20; the kind of place where François could not even afford to buy a drink—and then went home. He didn't turn back. In the corridors of the RER station, he wept with rage.

That's when he starts going off the rails. He stops working in class and begins hanging around the housing estate. One of the guys in his building—the caretaker's son, mixed race, with dark hair and green eyes—offers him work as a lookout. For about €40, he has to walk around the building, checking all the exits, and warn the others if the cops turn up. He does this conscientiously, but it's not exactly difficult: in general, the police only enter the estate in convoys, the lights of their vehicles flashing, because they're afraid of going there without backup. So he is usually able to see them coming from miles away. But occasionally, when they suspect a major drug deal or are targeting a big fish, they come more stealthily, in plain clothes, and then suddenly they rush out of vans that you hadn't even noticed arrive, grab you, shove your face to the ground, hands behind your back, and handcuff you; they don't worry about the charges until later. They run up the stairs and bang on doors, yelling: “Police! Open up!” It's total panic. When that kind of thing happens, you have to react quickly, and as everyone there knows, François is the fastest thing on two legs. He can race up three flights of stairs without panting; he can run across town without ever slowing down. It is his one and only talent, and he puts it to good use.

So, having proved his worth as a lookout, he's offered the chance to sell hash—and he agrees. They are putting their trust in him: it's a sort of promotion. It's no big deal, though—just a few joints hidden under his coat. He has to hang around train stations and parking lots, spotting potential clients, and one night he walks over to two guys in a car who turn out to be plainclothes cops, and he's arrested. He is locked up in a detention center before his trial, but he tells the judge a sob story and is sentenced to a number of hours of community service. So he ends up scrubbing graffiti off the wall of an elementary school, shoveling dead leaves and trash in the playground: empty orange juice cartons, sticky candy wrappers, dog-eared trading cards. He spends hours doing this, supervised by a twenty-five-year-old social worker, a laid-back far-left idealist, and everyone is happy. When he gets back home, he wants to get back into dealing, and by hanging around the gang leaders, he is eventually given the job of hiding weapons imported from the Balkans. This is more serious shit, but he accepts right away, no questions asked. Officially, these weapons are to protect the housing estate, but in reality, as everyone knows, they will be used to train young jihadists or will be bought by gangs of armed robbers or drug dealers. But that isn't his problem, and selling guns is a potential gold mine for him: he would have been crazy to pass up this chance to make a success of his life, to get a piece of the action. He finds a nice, quiet spot in a nearby forest: no one ever goes there, and he sometimes even gets to shoot the guns himself. He loves that: feeling their weight in his hands, the smell of gunpowder, the deafening noise when he pulls the trigger. But most of all, what he loves is throwing grenades: pulling the pin like you'd pull the tab on a Coke can and tossing it as far as you can. It's dangerous, of course—it could go off in your hand—but what a fucking kick.

“It was around this time that I saw you at Mom's place. I thought to myself:
He's made it, so can I
.”

Deep down, though, even if he likes guns, even if this small-scale arms-dealing is exciting and sometimes makes him feel like he's living in an action movie, he knows that it is more likely to lead him to prison than to Australia, the place he has dreamed of going ever since a kid from the estate went there and made his fortune manufacturing tiger-stripe sweat suits. “So anyway, I found your address . . . and you know the rest.”

François has tears in his eyes—he takes a long drink to hide his emotion—and Samir realizes that he's done it: coaxed the beast from its cage, tamed it merely by listening. He tells him that he is going to help him. “Go home, and I will pay for your studies. I won't let you fall. But you have to promise me that you won't go near drugs or guns anymore, that you'll be a good boy. And give it a rest with those ultraviolent video games too: that stuff messes with your head.” François nods obediently. “Okay,” says Samir. “You can stay another two or three weeks, then—I'll take care of everything and . . .”

But no, François wants to go back to France right away. He is pale; he looks like he's about to throw up. And it is now that he confesses to Samir that he is in trouble. He tells him what happened outside the club the other night—the woman he messed with. He regrets it now, and he's scared—scared that she will press charges or tell someone. He was drunk that night:
You got me drunk—I'm not used to drinking that much
. He has forgotten what really happened—did he hurt her? He doesn't see why he should be punished for something he doesn't even remember, and anyway,
She was asking for it
, he yells:
She was like a whore in her miniskirt, her blouse hanging open so you could see everything. They're all asking for it, those sluts, so you give 'em what they want and then they blubber about it! I don't get it—are you supposed to ask their permission, when their whole attitude says come and fuck me? Samir, I'm scared now—she might make up anything. She might say I raped her when I hardly even touched her. They're crazy, those bitches, they might do anything. I want to go home
. Samir is disgusted by this speech. Did he rape that girl? Did he try to touch her? He wants to shake his brother until he remembers, until he confesses. Let him spend the rest of his life in prison. But he doesn't say any of this. His single most pressing preoccupation is to get François as far away from New York as possible, to keep him at a distance from his family and himself. He persuades him that staying in the United States would be dangerous: “You're right to be scared. She might well press charges. You have no idea what kind of risk you'd be running if you stayed here. Cops specializing in sex crimes—and believe me, they're the worst—could turn up at your hotel tomorrow with DNA samples that would put you in jail. You'd get twenty years, and even the best lawyer in the world wouldn't be able to reduce that sentence. You'd have all the feminist groups on your back. You'd have public opinion against you. And you're French, on top of everything else. Listen, you're right—you need to go home.” He is going against his deepest convictions, he is betraying himself—but fear is dictating his every word now. “Hang on,” says François, “what am I supposed to do when I get home? I need money—I can't go on like this. I want to put my life straight. No more messing around.” He came to America to ask for help, to try to escape his situation, “not to go back to being a small-time dealer.”

“I'm going to help you.”

“You'd do that for me?”

“Yes.”

“But why? You told me yourself that I'm nothing to you.”

“If you don't believe I'm doing it for you, then think about it this way: I'm doing it for Mom. So she won't have to worry about you constantly anymore. So she won't wake up in the middle of the night, panicking that you're not home or that you're drunk or high. So she won't call me to say she's not eating because all she can think about is you and what you're up to and how she's scared that the cops will arrest you and her reputation will be ruined—honor is important for her, you know. For all these reasons, I will provide you with money. But in exchange, you have to promise me that you'll stay there and find a job or even go to college. Promise me you won't use this money to buy drugs or blow it all in a casino.”

“You'd find out from Mom, I guess?”

“I've got better things to do than spy on you, François. I have a job, a family. I prefer to trust you.”

This word—“trust”—removes all the tension between them, and it is François who continues, in a calm, relieved voice:

“The best thing would be if you paid me a certain amount every month. That way, I couldn't blow it all.”

“How much?”

“I don't know . . . what do you . . .”

“No, go ahead, I'm listening. Work out how much you really need . . .”

“Two thousand euros a month? That wouldn't kill you. You'd get to live in peace, and so would I—I'd have enough to pay all the bills, and to get something nice for Mom occasionally. So, I'll go back to France and leave you in peace . . .”

Samir feels so relieved, he laughs. Two thousand euros is nothing for him—he could have asked for eight thousand and he still would have said yes. He nods his agreement.

“But how will you do it? Get me the money, I mean?”

“I'll just open an account in France and put money into it every month. I can sort that in a couple of days.”

“What if your wife finds out?”

“Oh, you're worrying about me now, are you?”

“I don't want you to lose everything because of me . . .”

“She won't find out. I'll do it discreetly. I have contacts in the banking world. It's not a problem.”

“Samir,” François asks, “why do you let Mom rot in that hellhole when you have enough money to set her up in a nice apartment?”

“She refuses to move. It's her choice, not mine.”

“I bet I could persuade her . . .”

“You want more? Isn't this enough?”

François does not reply to this. He grabs his sports bag and announces that he is going to take the subway to the airport: he wants to leave right away. But Samir refuses: he wants to accompany his brother (less out of affection than the desire to know for sure that he really has left). In the airport, they hug as his flight is called, and Samir pats his shoulder.
Forget what happened. Have a good trip!
Samir watches him walk toward security, waving and calling out,
See you soon!
when all he really wants is never to see him again.

It is a question writers are asked all the time: How long does it take you to write a book? As if writing had some sort of connection with architecture and construction, as if it were possible to forecast deadlines and delivery dates. But writing, because it has no rules, is not so easily constrained. There is something asocial in the act of writing: you write
against
. Given all this, how is it possible to establish the basis of any kind of social contract? Samuel has never managed it: that is why he chose to be a social worker—to stay in a place filled with people who are suffering just as much as he is, in different ways, perhaps, but all of them wounded, cracked. Since Nina left, his life has been structured around solitude. Writing enables him to keep depression at a distance. He writes in order to survive, to not fall sick. Working and working, he catches a glimpse of the building's shape, and is now able to answer: “One year.”

Another question, asked less often, is nevertheless at the very center of the creative process: At what point do you know that a book is finished? Samuel has been trying to answer this question every day for the past month. He rereads, adds, cuts, corrects . . . His emotional stability now depends not on the love of a woman but on the position of a word or a semicolon, the rhythm of a sentence. The musicality of language. This need to be connected to writing as if you were mining your own soul (but mining it for what?): he has never found anything as intense that can make the chaos of existence bearable. When Samuel can read what he's written without annotating it, he knows the book is finished. There is nothing more to say. He can send it out. Here and there, he notices a dip in the tempo that might destabilize the reader; he senses the parts that people might not like. But he doesn't change anything. Writing means accepting that some people won't like it. He hates perfectionism, that obsession with “good writing.” Literature is disorder. The world is disorder. How else can writing describe its brutality? The words don't have to be in the
right place
. Literature exists in precisely this area of precariousness.

Samuel is not aiming for anything in particular; his only ambition is to write, feeding his story every day as if it were some insatiable predator. Crazy, isn't it, the way his mental and emotional equilibrium depends on putting his own fiction into words?